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The Very Beginnings

#openttdcoop started in late 2004/early 2005. guru3, ShaggZ, xahodo, Mucht and dp met up in the IRC channel of the OpenTTD community, #openttd on the Freenode IRC network. There were many reasons for starting an all-separate community dedicated for doing cooperative gameplay:

• Teamplay is fun.
• Your gaming skills improve if you exchange your building styles in a non-competitive environment.
• The mapcycle gets faster - you don't have to play on one map for days to complete it since many players are helping to build a network.

guru3 started to host the first dedicated server. The early maps were 256x256 only since OTTD did not support bigmaps back then.

The Restructuring

After a period of little activity during the spring/summer period of 2005, most members of #openttdcoop got together again in September 2005. In the meantime, OpenTTD had seen heavy development, which allowed for the creation of many new strategies and styles.

The community also decided to change and expand its own structure:

• There would be a Wiki instead of a webpage in order to improve information flow.
• There would be a definition of 'Membership' and a clear regulation on how to become a member
• There would be a unified appearance of #openttdcoop (signature for tt-forums, logo, etc.)

Thanks to valhallasw, who hosts the wiki, guru3, who hosts our signature and most members and close-to-membership players, the goals above were completed.

The 'Finally-at-Home'-Period

One day Brianetta joined our community and offered us the possibility to host a dedicated server for our games. We gratefully agreed to his offer and are proud to have two servers online now:

• The main server which is restricted playground for members and trusted players
• The Sandbox Server which is the playground for our upcoming players, learning platform and fun park at once.

After setting up the dedicated servers many aspirants joined our community. #openttdcoop is now well-structured and became a known part of the OpenTTD-Universe.

The Period of steadily improvements

With a stable basis of dedicated members, #openttdcoop managed to promote itself in the OpenTTD-Universe. Starting from May 2006, various improvements were made:

• Brianetta managed to code his Autopilot. This provides communication between the game server and IRC. Furthermore, Autopilot has features like pausing/unpausing related to a client counting, a new password system and even an IRC-bot!
• Osai created our blog thus providing a place to publish our user's opinions, stories and reports. The wiki was extended, adapted and improved by many members, almost-members and new players around the community.